Should Doctors Open Online Consultation Services? An Empirical Investigation of Their Impact on Offline Appointments

Online healthcare portals have become prevalent worldwide in recent years. One common form of a healthcare portal is the online consultation website, which provides a bridge between patients and doctors and reduces patients’ time and cost when seeking healthcare services. Another form is the healthcare service appointment website, which facilitates offline visits for patients. Although nominally separate, the behaviors of the users (including patients and doctors) on these two types of websites could be related to each other. In particular, how does opening online consultation services impact the offline appointments of doctors? Although this is an important question for healthcare portals, doctors, and policy makers, it has not been rigorously examined in the literature. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this important gap by examining the overall impact of offering online consultations on offline appointments. Our results show that the number of offline appointments for doctors increases after opening an online consultation service. Additionally, we examine how several factors, such as recommendation heat, hospital ranking, and doctor title, moderate the impact of opening online consultation services on doctors’ offline appointments. Given that online consultation is a new but important way to connect patients and doctors, our findings provide useful implications for all the stakeholders—doctors, patients, hospitals, and policy makers—regarding how to integrate online and offline channels in the healthcare context.

History: Param Singh, Senior Editor; Yuliang (Oliver) Yao, Associate Editor.

Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 72071057, 71922009, 71871080, and 72188101].

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.1145.